April's Anarchist Zines & Pamphlets

"Go print some press boy, we've got wood to chop!" - John Zerzan

From Sprout Distro

The following zines were published in the broad anarchist space over the past month. We encourage folks to read, discuss, debate, and circulate the zines they find relevant. We have heard of folks using these round-ups as a way of staying informed, as the basis for sending mailings to prisons, and for reading groups.

Note: It has been a while since we have done one of these, but we will be publishing these monthly again. If you have suggestions for zines to include, please contact us.

Zines and Pamphlets - April 2021

Without Police: Community Safety & Accountability Alternatives in Three Examples

This zine collects stories of communities who have developed working alternatives to police with an eye towards expanding conversations around abolishing police. It provides brief overviews of experiments in community safety occurring in in the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (Rojava), Michoacan, Mexico, and those by the Zapatistas in Chiapas. The brief outlines here can help us expand our understanding of what a world without police could look like. The examples also serve as a reminder that the transition to a world without police would also mean a fundamental shift in the nature of society.

Download PDF: Screen | Print

Without Police Zine

Making Sense of Fascism

This zine presents an edited version of an essay by Matthew N. Lyons aimed at sharpening our collective analysis and understanding of fascism. The author argues that many people understand fascism very narrowly and that this limits our ability to understand and respond to fascists. Lyons writes:

“Fascism is a revolutionary form of right-wing populism, inspired by a totalitarian vision of collective rebirth, that challenges capitalist political and cultural power while promoting economic and social hierarchy. This definition—with its twin focus on ideology and class rule—offers a fuller, more rounded model of fascism. In the process, it gives us a more powerful tool to map divisions, relationships, and changes in right-wing politics, and to understand how these dynamics relate to changes in capitalism.”

Download PDF: Screen | Print (Color)

Settlers on the Red Road Zine Cover

Settlers on the Red Road: On Indigeneity, Appropriation, and Belonging

This zine addresses the phenomenon of an increasing number of anarchists claiming indigenous identity on dubious grounds and the role that this can play in undermining solidarity with Indigenous communities. It discusses the problems of using the blood quantum approach to determining who is Indigenous, the role of kinship, the emergence of race-shifting, and the ways in which settler claims of “being native” often bolster the state’s goal of reconciliation. Running through the text is a critique of identity politics and its limits. While the conversation is primarily centered on experiences in Canada, the discussion is relevant to the United States.

Download PDF: Screen | Print

Face to Face with the Enemy Zine Cover

Face to Face with the Enemy

With the subtitle “a brief overview of last year’s attacks against power in France 2020-2021, this zine collects reports of attacks in France by anarchists and others against the system of power. It documents the emergence of “a broad wave of sabotage” that targeted “the veins of domination: its networks of telecommunication, transport and energy.” There are reports of a large number of attacks on cell phone towers, Internet cables, and other such targets that are essential pieces of infrastructure in the technological era. Alongside the brief action reports there are several essays highlighting anarchist agency and analyzing the current period.

Download PDF: Screen

Earth First! News Cover

Earth First! News – Spring 2021

The latest edition of the Earth First! newsletter features the usual report backs of eco-action across the world alongside articles covering continued conversations around the future of Earth First!, ongoing campaigns, and a report on the Midwest Climb Camp. There is also a list of political prisoners that are in need of support.

Download PDF: Screen

Anathema – April 2021 Zine Cover

Anathema – April 2021

The recent issue of this anarchist periodical from Philadelphia (occupied Lenape territory) features writings on recent events in Philadelphia and the United States as a whole. There is a chronology of actions in Philadelphia, reports and analysis of local struggles, a discussion on the merits of the black bloc vs a so-called “light” or “grey bloc”, trends in repression, and an article on the January 6 riots at the US capitol.

Download PDF: Screen | Print

The Baldies & Anti-Racist Action Zine Cover

The Baldies & Anti-Racist Action: A History of Anti-Racist Skinhead Organizing

This zine documents the history of The Baldies, an anti-racist skinhead crew that formed in the 1980s in Minneapolis. In these conversations, participants reflect on their experiences fighting neo-Nazis in the streets, organizing community resistance to white nationalism, and offer lessons learned for those in the thick of the fight today. The group played a pivotal role in the formation of Anti-Racist Action (ARA). The interviews presented here were originally conducted for the “It Did Happen Here Podcast".

Download PDF: Imposed

215 Rioters Zine Cover

215 Rioters: Heroes Forever

From the editors: “This zine is a compilation of analyses and reports from the 2020 Walter Wallace uprising in Philadelphia. The authors have revised their pieces and written an introduction to give context to their thoughts. Two anonymous action reports are also included to bring to light some less publicized aspects of the rebellion. As the police make it clear that they will continue to kill Black people it is our intention that these kinds of reflections and histories help us sharpen our struggle to free ourselves from the forces of anti-Blackness and social control.”

Download PDF: Screen | Print

Return Fire Zine Coer

Return Fire – Vol. 6, Chapter 2

The Winter 2020-2021 issue of Return Fire features its usual assortment of essays critical of civilization and technology. In this issue authors address the COVID lockdowns and the role that cybernetics play in making them sustainable, campaigns in the United Kingdom, a chronicle of actions, discussions on the ramifications of anarchists retreating from the streets over the past year, the potential for a new Luddite current, and more. There is also an interesting article on anarchism during the Spanish Civil War and the actions that women took in resisting the collective work projects mandated by the anarcho-syndicalist and Marxist forces.

Download PDF: Screen

Another Word for Settle Zine Cover

Another Word for Settle: A Response to Rattachments and Inhabit

This zine presents a critique of two texts – Reattchments (Re-attachments in English) and Inhabit – that have circulated recently in the radical milieu in Canada and the United States. The two texts are heavily influenced by the Invisible Committee and are associated with what is often called the Tiqqunist, Appelist, or autonomist current. The zine critically analyzes the texts’ calls for a project of “inhabiting” territories, which in the absence of an anti-colonial grounding, can be a call for settlers to take land on which they have no claim. The points within are worth considering when it comes to deepening our understanding of what it means to be anti-colonial.

Download PDF: Imposed

There are 42 Comments

Seaweed wrote a lot about this 15 or 20 years ago - what they called creating “permanent subsistence zones “. They wrote a lot about not only accessing land as a precondition for autonomy, but specifically on the idea of anarchy meaning being embedded in a habitat. The concept in settler colonial contexts was exploring the tension between re-indigenizing and acknowledging prior/ongoing territorial/habitat occupation...

Its basically about shedding the paradigm of property ownership. In layman's terms, to adopt a permanent nomadicity on a day by day basis. Everything else just falls into place then.

Also my belief, tho nomadism is socially difficult in a society dominated by the sedentary and subcultural milieus.relying on intense herd gimmicks and aesthetics.Nomads need safe spots/shelters/houses where to meet up and hangout for a while. Living on your own in the streets, from town to town, can be mentally-damaging. I've seen a few people who literally turned feral and there was nothing Hollywood about it... they were more alienated from good conditions of living an seemingly living under constant insecurity. The hippie types got it better (subculture tho).

So yeah, many things fall into place, but not necessarily people or relations. We defo need a kind of nomad's union, and fuck with these workerist pseudo-unions.

Yup a neo-hippie squatter network with free accomodation hubs gradually infiltrating capitals hegemony. The "Squippiemads" can travel seasonally and still maintain a semi-sedentary or permanent residence tending food gardens and doing caretaker duties. Travelling with children can be hard and unhealthy sometimes in freezing weather, burning heat etc. A bartering/gift economy is easy when the typical boring and stereotyped entreprenerial hero-worship values are exposed for what they really are, narcissistic greed.
Its not really hard to get working, its just that Leviathan has built a strong omnipotent cage and only small experiments can permiate the reticulatum of land/property ownership.
Its not new, TAZ e.g.

who would start such a project and maintain it, but the difficulty is finding that now adays, for the reasons you give: people have their own personal financial/existential struggles within leviathan. Direct communication is hard.

Fuck the TAZ, Temporary zones are part of the reason why don't have them anymore today. Real squatter cultures only respond to eviction by more squatting, and sometimes street fighting.

What I was just about to reply to the polite 18:40 anon was that my TAZ was not the 20th century organized event but the 21st century individualist variant which used fixed location hubs of random casual convergence. These hubs exist on a griď approximately 30 km apart so that the distance between them could be walked in one day, thus doing away with the need for mechanical transport systems and therefore further freeing the motivated participants of embroilment and enslavement to the capitalist's economic gas and regulatory bullshit that automobiles and transportation require.
Good luck with your cycle of eviction/street fighting blunt object trauma injuries and angst.

... you mean, just walking to places and sometimes talking to people you meet? that's already a thing.

so has the tension been explored yet? awaiting results!

Several from people using the same language eg. - insurgent subsistence, insurrectionary subsistence - . who are involved in various solidarity efforts, occupation camps, etc. B&G Review interviewed a few people from that scene some issues ago...

was mostly joking but if I were to be serious (!!!) ... I'm familiar with seaweed's context and although I admire the unpretentious thoughtfulness, I also grew up in the sticks and mostly it seems like they're just talking about a thoughtful, humble rural lifestyle.

nothing wrong with that but it's not very ambitious either. certainly hasn't generated much insurrection thus far.

I think what they are saying is that Anarchists should think about being initially oriented toward occupying habitats ( as opposed to urban activism, building organizations, etc.). That’s a lot more than aiming toward a rural lifestyle. It’s more about claiming and creating anarchic territory through long term occupation of a loosely defined area (that over time becomes their habitat.). Thus the idea of what they called “permanent subsistence zones”. So in the family of ZAD, Chiapas, Rojava, etc.

yeah fair but my only point is ... how's that going? should I give it another few lifetimes? awaiting results!

Well, possibly, people are doing just that. Living their lives in nature. There’s nothing really spectacular about it. What, are you expecting a reportback or something? It’s just folks doing their own thing.

that ... was my original point. like I said, I lived that way already for many years and although I don't have any problem with it, even admire it, it's still suffering from the same old problems as lots of other anarchist analysis imo.

ie how is this not just a "lifestyle" and/or is that the limits of what some people mean by anarchy? that's fine for them but my interests do not end with a quiet, modest life that doesn't do much harm, it's more of a bare minimum of ambition for anarchy in my view.

I think you might be misreading their work, which is tied to insurrectionary practices. Its about claiming territory, not retreating into a simple lifestyle. If you define an area as your habitat, which supplies you (and your kin/friends) with everything they need, then you want to defend that habitat and the set of lifeways you have built around it. They aren’t talking about intentional communities or just hunting and fishing and living a quiet life, although actually I think that those are some of the things they have done/do.

But the people inspired by or who were part of the development of those ideas are either involved in solidarity efforts with indigenous reoccupation sites, doing land defence, etc., or quietly working with others wherever they live to try to reconnect with the idea of belonging to a habitat and trying to build something from there. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t also writing to prisoners, doing a pirate radio station, organizing anti police brutality actions, or bringing coffee to wildcat strikers . It just means recognizing that those things fall short of something fundamental - that ultimately access to land is necessary to experiment socially or to build anything from.

Self-managing the city form or taking control of production seems un-anarchic to me. So what’s left? Individual rejection and forms of destruction by any number of people aiming toward .... horizontal networks of autonomous groups. In Land and Freedom and other writing, they make it clear that the big picture idea is forms of secession in the here and now because it is possible to some extent, and these secessions are aimed at creating autonomous cultures/groups of friends/islands etc. - which ultimately link up with others. The quote they used was “ ponds become oceans” or something like that.

The author of desert quotes seaweed in the opening pages : “ To give up hope for global anarchist revolution is not to resign oneself to anarchy remaining an eternal protest. Seaweed puts it well:

Revolution is not everywhere or nowhere. Any bioregion can be liberated through a succession of events and strategies based on the conditions unique to it, mostly as the grip of civilisation in that area weakens through its own volition or through the efforts of its inhabitants... Civilisation didn’t succeed everywhere at once, and so it’s undoing might only occur to varying degrees in different places at different times. [13]
Even if an area is seemingly fully under the control of authority there are always places to go, to live in, to love in and to resist from. And we can extend those spaces. The global situation may seem beyond us, but the local never is. As anarchists we are neither entirely powerless nor potentially omnipotent, thankfully.”

I can see what you're saying and why but perhaps you'd do me the courtesy of not defaulting to assuming it's because I'm a dim bulb who can't read?

I'm gently and respectfully pushing back on this particular version of the anti-civ, post left tendency, which I participated in for years, as I mentioned and know many people who also have. Specifically where seaweed lives or did, among others. I'm risking opsec here to assure you I'm not casually dismissing this stuff, mmk?

So anyway, folks moved out on to "the land", got to know it again, have wrestled with how that intersects with colonialism, spent a great deal of time in quiet contemplation of the contradictions, yadda yadda and I admire lots of the analysis BUUUT

there's still the same old problems that date back to at least the 60s era, of how scattering a very marginal perspective across vast distances leads to all the weaknesses you'd expect from extreme isolation. people are lonely and lack support in their isolation, it's expensive or exhausting to travel to and from, and so on and so on.

There's a Peter Gelderloos quote I can dig up for you if you want but the short version is, if you're going to be prescriptive at all, how "we" (don't get me started on the we) need solid networks that spread across the urban and rural environments, allowing ease of movement and places to stay in both and trying to pick one or the other is just a false dichotomy. That's my opinion as a backwoods anarchist at heart, currently living in a big, stupid city that I hate.

I don’t think that I was making those assumptions. Let me try to understand your point of view. It’s a big topic. Are you saying that it’s too early in the game for most of us to start claiming land as a potential territory or habitat? That we need networks that cross the entire geography as a starting point to counter our isolation and to create more potential for friendships and thus experiments? ( I know lots of ‘we’ there). We being green anarchist types mostly, but anarchic types generally...

the second part mostly! it's never "too early" but a lot of the kneejerk rejection of urban struggles is a post left thing that has also played out now too imo.

I've interacted with several decades worth of anarchists now, who tried to fight in the cities, got discouraged and retreated to the woods, many of them waving seaweed's zines and now, I don't get the sense of a stronger, lily pads connecting, ponds to oceans ... thing.

that's just not how the terrain appears to me and I don't see it changing any time soon but I'd like to be wrong?
I'm arguing it's a bit of a false dichotomy but of course people should live and fight wherever seems most appropriate to them.

The idea was clearly for the very long term. In any case lots of anarchists aren’t from cities or don’t currently live in one. So regardless an anarchist strategy and outlook for non urban anarchists and their allies seems useful. Besides seaweed, I don’t know of any other anarchists who have tried to develop an explicitly rural or semi rural anarchist practice that might have widespread application - apart from rewilders- but they seem more one dimensional.

I know that one of the ideas that seaweed put out there was for anarchists to try and pick a place - ecological/social region or town or village - and stick to it - the smaller the better. So they invited lots of anarchists to the town where they live - beginning in the early 1990s. Thirty years later and the impact of constantly having a couple of dozen anarchists in one smallish place is there - including how having lots of comrades making a life in the same place makes it feel like it’s not just a scene. The original excitement might have died down, but he started an intentional community that is successful AFAIK, and lots of other projects and actions have come from it.

I just reread some of their essays and they do say that we should leave the city and move to the countryside as a long term strategy and for ones own health. But they also say that anarchists just need to acknowledge that cities aren’t habitats and therefore don’t have much potential for creating autonomous zones that can last very long - at least not outside of a capitalist context - because they need food, energy sources, etc from outside the city. They write that the rural subsistence zones they are writing about could be ‘a network of base camps ‘ for comrades in a whole region - “ city friends can hide out there, heal there, regroup there etc and the rural comrades can bring fish and meat to their friends in the city...etc.,”.

But to get back to your original comment re insurrection- depends how you use the term to some extent. Is Wolfi Landstreicher still an insurrectionary if he mostly just drinks wine and writes poetry? If you mean upheaval in the streets - then no. But if you mean trying to take control of ones life in a collective context as anarchists, I.e., trying to create an anarchic culture in a region through making long term connections with indigenous peoples and practicing mutual aid and solidarity with them, often on the front lines, and exploring possibilities for reindigenizing then yes, there seems to have been some success.

well you've covered the nuance here^ but I did use humour at the beginning to say the same thing? Wait a few more lifetimes and the successes depend on "what is meant by insurrection".

Yes exactly. Oh how well I know this and it sounds like you and I are using different yardsticks but that's fine. As I said already, my interests in anarchy are not limited to escaping to the woods, although I love it out there as much as anyone.

The "frontlines" in the PNW are ... underwhelming at this time imo. I know them quite well.

oh yeah! Forgot to say - No. Wolfi doesn't even enter the solar system I'm talking about with his windbag edgelord bullshit.

Both Kevin Tucker and John Zerzan are rural primal anarchists that put their theory into practice. You should look them up. Probably they influenced Seaweed.

Kevin Tucker is a complete joke. Zerzan is ... a cute and relatively harmless, albeit grumpy old man with an excruciatingly cringey bad radio show. This is @news, do you even know where you are? wow anons ... just wow. it's fine. whatever. SIGH

KT doesn't live up to his own standards -- complaining about tech and social media use while on it constantly, and he and jz are both extremely dogmatic gatekeepers about what counts as relevant / primitivist.
JZ pretty much argues for anyone who supports him, and both are tending away from any interesting conception of anarchist, weighing way more heavily on not just Green, and their own very particular interpretation of Green.

just calling people jokes, etc, is even less useful than the general issues i raise.

i'd be quoting corrosive consciousness here, but i'll just do the obnoxious thing and drop the title instead. it is a really good take down of those two though. for those who want to actually do a little research.

look, I respect how you have rigorous standards of substantive argument instead of ad hominem but I'm going to have to insist that kevin tucker isn't even worthy of the effort. that is my view. not sorry :P

but you're not talking to kt. you're talking to someone who doesn't know what the fuck you're talking about (presumably). if that person isn't worth talking to/explaining things to/practicing your reasoning skills on, then why respond to them at all?

gasp. are you... virtue signaling?!?! ;)

you silly goose! dismissive mockery is entirely appropriate in some situations. a great example of which would be ... kevin tucker's writing! PRIMAL WAAAARRRR FTW!!!

Shane Burley is another example of a living praxis. He literally wrote the book on Why We Fight.

"Shane Burley is another example of a living praxis. He literally wrote the book on Why We Fight."

Not sure why he spends so much time palling with Alexander Reid Ross, proud Fed friend.

Sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette for your friends in consulting firms who work with the state department

"i can see what you're saying and why but perhaps you'd do me the courtesy of not defaulting to assuming it's because I'm a dim bulb who can't read?"

I seem to remember you assuming that same thing about other people, on many occasions, without any evidence to back it up.

*eyeroll at the mods* it's just a request ... voluntary. I wouldn't presume to dictate terms like so many trolls here

" I lived that way already for many years and although I don't have any problem with it," lol, yeah, like your nomadicity is travelling in a pick-up truck with a mattress in the back lolol.

kind of, yeah? I was really fukin poor, not that I'm rich now. but like, that $50 or $100 worth of food when I could scoop some free meals off the beach or out of a dumpster mattered quite a bit to my bottom line. such is the glamour of anarchy!

As opposed to what... you giga-Windbaggo mobile suburban home that burns a 100$ just to get to the WalMart? lol

Laughing at poverty is way petty, but also brutally normie.

I totally did have a janky old truck with a mattress in the back so I'm gonna dissolve in to paranoia for a few days now

how did the trolls know...

Pick-ups with a mattress in the back are the most no-brainer attempt at van lyfe. It's like when I was a teenager a dude did that to cross Canada.. Not the most brilliant or most comfy van arrangement, but by far the easiest. So it's a safe guess...

thanks for your concern for my mental health but that was a joke

Do you happen to know what issue of B&G Review that interview was in?

B&G Review #3

Add new comment